The more you pay attention to something the more of it you get!

This is a wonderful concept if what you’re paying attention to is something that you like and want more of; but if your focus is on a problem or an issue that you’d like to change, it can keep you endlessly stuck, frustrated and miserable – wondering why things won’t change for the better!

Here’s a personal story that I think beautifully shows how this concept works.

Many years ago, when I was a young woman, I lived in Arizona. I moved there right after I got married to my first husband who had gotten a job in Phoenix. I thought I would love it because I had always loved summer and warmth and sunshine, and I was ready to leave winter and my small New England town behind. I wanted a new adventure to go with my new life!

I was not prepared for what happened when I got there. I hated it! I mean I really hated it! I hated everything about it. I hated the heat, the barren landscape, the dirt, the dust, the traffic, the houses right on top of each other, the lifestyle, the lack of seasons and I even came to hate the sunshine! It was endless and relentless, and it burned the skin right off you!

I loudly complained every day to my new husband and everyone else who would listen about how horrible Arizona was and how much I hated it! I missed Connecticut. I missed my family. I missed my woods and my green and my water and my seasons and snow at Christmas.

I spent every day for the first 7 years complaining and wishing I was back in Connecticut. With each year that went by I became more and more miserable, more and more unhappy.

It affected my marriage; it affected my health and I started having panic attacks and all kinds of physical ailments.

Finally, I woke up one day and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had dropped to a whole new level of misery and I remember thinking, “I just want to dig a hole, get in it and cover myself up and never come out.” And at that point I said to myself, “Bonnie, do you want to keep feeling like this for the rest of your life?” My immediate answer back was, “No, I don’t!

Then I said to myself, “Bonnie you live in Arizona, there’s nothing you can do about that right now, so unless you want to keep feeling like this every day you’re going to have to find a way to make the best of it.”

As I thought about it, I realized not everyone hated Arizona, in fact my husband loved it and so did a lot of other people. I didn’t think I could love it, since my current reality was that I hated it, but I decided to make a commitment to start looking for things that I did like.

When I started looking around, the first thing that I noticed was that I never did any real decorating in my house. I hadn’t cared because I wanted to leave. So, the first thing I decided I would focus on was making my house look beautiful and feel warm and inviting.

I jumped wholeheartedly into this project! It stimulated my creative juices which had been unused for the last 7 years and it was a lot of fun and felt good!

The more I focused on and picked up steam with my house beautification, the easier it was to find other things I liked about Arizona as well.

Then a really crazy thing started happening. I woke up one morning and realized I was happy! I felt good and I was enjoying my life even though I was still living in Arizona!

Here’s the point of this story and what you might call the frosting on the cake of my happiness.

After a couple of months of feeling happy and really liking my life, out of the blue, my husband came home from work one day and said he’d been transferred, and we were moving back to Connecticut!

Once I gave up my complaining and focusing on what I didn’t like and found a way to focus on what felt good and what I did like, what I had begged for and dreamed about for nine years just effortlessly happened without me doing anything!

The moral of the story is: you can have 10 things going wrong in your life and one thing going right and if you put your attention on what’s going right and take it off what’s going wrong, everything will start to shift and improve. Conversely, you can have 10 things going right and one thing going wrong and if you dig in and hyper focus on the “problem” you will just start attracting more and more problems into your life.

We all get to choose.

What do you choose to focus your attention on today?

Since your mind is always thinking about something, you might as well think about something that feels good while you are thinking it! – Bonnie